Some thoughts. Inspired by our Symposium “Possible Futures – Art, Museums and Digital Archives”
- Few words have become as commonplace as “memory”. Memory, which until recently has been limited to historiographical, neurological and psychoanalytical fields of study, has now become a primary aspect of the everyday life.
- After all, memory is a sort of quantifiable datum nowadays, a measurement and even an indicator of one’s social status. A fetish has been made of “memory” as a “thing”: _ How much memory does your computer have? _What about your camera? _And your mobile? _All that?! _ Only that?…
- Memories are bought, memories are transferred, and memories are erased and lost. Paradoxically, the over-use in discourse is equivalent to a methodological emptiness when it comes to cultural products created with the different media related to these memories: digital media.
- How to preserve the memory of cultural devices that resist objectification, which often exist only contextually – such as net art – and whose processing includes its erasure?
- How to deal with such unstable memories, which last the same as the service life of the equipment and whose typology does not correspond to current models of cataloguing museum and archives collections?
- How is it possible, nowadays, not to think of cultural memory as both an economic issue and a service that should call for some sort of ethical code? After all, personal memories are increasingly mediated by corporations – which appear as big data repositories – through services that are interrupted as soon as they are no longer considered an interesting niche market. [remember geocities…]
- This imminent disappearance might explain the eschatological tone present in the most basic commands available in digital editing programs, which keep on asking us to “Save” files instead of simply storing them.
- In order to avoid giving in to a catastrophist hypothesis and aiming at going beyond the pressure from both the disposability of the market and the economy of programmed obsolescence, we propose a reflection upon the new meanings of memory and memorization technologies. This also includes new approaches to emergent informal archives like Ubu Web, AAAARG.org and the countless private and public collections of links that are so popular today. Moreover, the way we live more and more mediated by databases of all sorts and contemporary phenomena like the Wikileaks unfold the discussion towards a debate of the politics of information and public access to data.
- Our aim is to discuss new strategies and methodologies of preservation and for collecting digital art and information, to present relevant case studies and programs in this field as well as to reflect on the emergence of database aesthetics, politics and culture. This discussion will follow four main themes: “New Memories: Archives of the Future”; “Between Past and Future: Building the Present and New Archives”, “Underground Collector” and “Information Curation and Database Aesthetics”.
- The first theme is devoted to new approaches in museology, archiving and storage, which are dealing with the preservation and collecting procedures of digital culture. The second presents and analyses experiences of digitization of different kinds of non-digital collections and problems related to the restoration of electronic artworks and new cataloging tools and software. The third theme approaches personal, informal and underground new forms of archiving. The last one aims at reflecting on the emerging issues related to archiving processes and practices.
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Possible Futures: Art, Museums and Digital Archives
Chairs
Giselle Beiguelman – Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAU USP), Brazil
Ana Gonçalves Magalhães – Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP) / Working Group Museum Archives and Research, Brazil
Co- Chair
Gerfried Stocker – ars eletronica, Austria
Organization:
Giselle Beiguelman – Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAU USP), Brazil
Ana Gonçalves Magalhães – Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP) / Working Group Museum Archives and Research, Brazil
Manuela Naveau – ars ars eletronica, Austria
Ana Paola Salviano de Souza (Assistant)
October 1st to 5th 2012
FAU-USP
Cid. Universitária